Weekend Openings: ‘A Cure’ for Building That ‘Great Wall’?

This weekend, multiplexes and Matt Damon may very well have a “cure” for what ails you. It’s not the best of slates hitting theaters, so you may have to dig deep for a quality offering. Luckily, we’re here to help:

Best Bet This Week

“A Cure for Wellness” (20th Century Fox)

Though lacking somewhat in quality, this horror hybrid doesn’t lack at all in imagination. Gore Verbinski throws everything at the wall in the hope that enough body horror, mysteries and thrills might stick. It doesn’t quite work, but it’s never boring. Dane DeHaan is subjected to all sorts of oddities, while the cinematography is admittedly beautiful in its own way. This is a very light recommendation, but as the most memorable release this week, “A Cure for Wellness” gets top honors.

Also Opening of Note

“Fist Fight” (Warner Brothers / New Line)

Charlie Day gets a shot to be a leading man with this broad comedy. With poor reviews to share so far, that doesn’t bode well for this flick. Furthermore, the trailers have been less than promising. Pairing Day with Ice Cube as feuding teachers does sound like a promising concept, however, so maybe there’s an 11th hour surprise brewing? Don’t bet on it, but if you’re a fan of one of the leads, perhaps that’ll be enough to sway you?

The aforementioned Matt Damon in a Zhang Yimou picture should be a welcome addition at the theater. Alas, this is a muddled mess of a would-be epic. Our review goes into full details, but it’s a fairly large disappointment. In addition, it wastes Damon, which is a crime all its own. Pretty clearly meant to clean up at the foreign box office and die a quick death stateside, expect most audience members to stay away, and rightly so.

The mumblecore movement has more or less faded away, but some of the filmmakers from that school are still doing very interesting work. Filmmaker So Yong Kim directs the pair of Riley Keough and Jena Malone in this romantic drama of sorts. It appears to very much be aimed at those who appreciate slow independent fare. Kim made a really underrated film years back with “The Exploding Girl,” so if this is anything like that, it’s well worth checking out.

Direct from the Sundance Film Festival comes this anthology horror outing with a feminist twist. Sundance has been a breeding ground for titles of this ilk, including the “V/H/S” franchise, but this is something a bit different. An all-female horror anthology from a group of filmmakers that includes Karyn Kusama, it has received strong reviews so far. If fright flicks are your thing, put this one squarely on your radar.

When he’s not obsessing over new Oscar predictions on a weekly basis, Joey is seeing between 300 and 350 movies a year. He views the best in order to properly analyze the awards race/season each year, but he also watches the worst for reasons he mostly sums up as "so you all don't have to". In his spare time, you can usually find him complaining about the Jets or the Mets. Still, he lives and dies by film. Joey's a voting member of Indiewire's Criticwire Network as well as the Internet Film Critics Association.

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